The Way We Live

About halfway through the Second World War in Britain, people started envisaging a brave new postwar world. "The Way We Live", made shortly after the war, taps into this idealism.

This movie reminds me of my school days, when we were ushered into a darkened room and treated a film on some instructive subject such as atomic power, fluoride or sugar production. In this case the topic was town planning, and the town in question was Plymouth. Using some slender fictional devices - a writer investigating postwar reconstruction, and a "typical" family suffering from overcrowding - "The Way We Live" sets out to inform rather than entertain. There isn't much drama, and no plot to speak of. It borrows a lot of footage from contemporary newsreels. In the end we don't even get to see the rebuilt city of Plymouth, because in 1946 the city was still awaiting reconstruction.

This was the Plymouth both my grandfather's returned home to after demob. What a sorry sight it must have been too. My mum told me my dad's mum, my grandmother Jesse and her daughter, were regulars up the Hoe (as in the film) dancing with the Yanks. My dad played truant from school to go shoot dice with the Yanks up the Hoe too. I know Efford well and the mums in the film could well be the grans of more than one of my school chums. I grew up on the post war Ernesettle estate with street names like Biggin Hill and Rochford Crescent. , German POWs used as labour force. My gran Jesse moved from a Devonport slum to a new build at Dryburgh Crescent, Ham Estate c1945 and was there till her death, my dad was still in the house in 2005, when it finally past from family hands back to the Council. Unlike social housing since 1970s, the council houses were so well built and had such big gardens, rear for dads veg, front for mums flowers, that many never moved again. As a Janner the film makes me feel a part of my roots and see old Plymouth through my parents (as children) and grandparents eyes. A gem of a film. Rewatchable.

Plymouth is quite a lovely city but the post war urban plan illustrated here was a bit of a disaster. It looked very modern but the flat-roofed shops symbolise post war planning blight and soulless urban decay. They may have talked about asking the people but what they ended up with was a ruined church stuck in the middle of a busy roundabout. What was all that marching at the end? Very sinister. I quite liked the stark modernism of the shopping centre as a child of the sixties and The Hoe remains lovely - they couldn't touch that - it is thrilling to see Sunderland flying boats moored in the harbour.

Incidentally, the wife and I danced on The Hoe to an American dance band on the 40th anniversary of VE Day.

Read Simon Jenkins critique. Yet another socialist disaster. The film was made by the woman who would become Michael Foot's wife.

Made in the somewhat emotionally raw period just after the utter devastation of WW2, Jill Craigie's agitprop 'The Way We Live' remains an uncommonly fascinating, greatly ambitious docudrama about the vastly daunting municipal undertaking of completely rebuilding the starkly ruinous, bombed-out remains of war-ravaged Plymouth, the maudlin scenes of the utter devastation wrought by aerial bombing proving to be exceptionally poignant. This exceptional film's didactic narrative is crisply narrated with a delightfully dry, erudite wit by the blonde-haired Tom (Peter Willes) whose matinee idol good looks and broadcaster diction demonstratively makes him the most 'theatrical' personality in the colourful cast of delightfully unknown faces, including a curious, but not uninteresting interlude with stalwart socialist M. P Michael Foot! 'The Way We Live' is not a cinematic relic, it is a positively vibrant, socially-engaged affair, with some especially wry observations from the wonderfully pragmatic patriarch Mr. Copperwheat (Francis Lunt), along with some delightfully enthusiastic alfresco Jitterbugging from his lovely fresh-faced daughter, all the myriad vignettes all coalesce into a satisfyingly cohesive whole, with the film's open-ended conclusion a precursor to the convention flouting histrionics of the La Nouvelle Vague, than the far more stolid, meat n' 'taters British cinema of the 40s/50s. Not only of interest to film history and WW2 buffs, as both cineastes and more casual film fans are sure to be no less charmed by the appealingly wholesome film's tangibly warm nature, its earnest political candour, and heart stirring optimism. A unjustly neglected film, since the glaring social injustices exposed within 'The Way We Live' are, sadly, no less relevant today.